Dec 17, 2010 07:35 GMT  ·  By

Chrome just outpaced Internet Explorer in terms of the version number, as Google delivered the 10th major iteration of Chrome to testers on December 16th. Google Chrome 10.0.612.1 is now available for download to early adopters, which also received a fresh Beta development milestone for the next version of the open source browser yesterday.

Chrome 10.0.612.1 can be grabbed via the Dev Channel by testers running either Windows, Mac OS X or Linux.

Google opted to highlight two changes that are impacting Chrome 10.0 on all platforms, namely the evolution of the V8 engine to 3.0.2.1, and the upgrade of WebKit to 534.15.

In addition, as far as Chrome on Windows users are concerned, “Google Cloud Print sign-in interface is now out from behind a flag and can be found in Under the Hood,” noted Karen Grunberg, from the Google Chrome team.

On December 16th, Chrome 9.0 graduated from the Dev Channel to Beta. Chrome 9.0.597.19 Beta has been released for testing just ahead of Chrome 10.0.612.1.

Chrome 9.0.597.19 Beta features important modifications, including enhanced sandboxing for the Flash Player plug-in that ships included into the open source browser by default.

Google has also kicked up a notch the Address Bar introducing instant search functionality. The promise from the Mountain View-based search giant is that sites will start loading as users type the URL in the Address Bar, long before they actually hit enter.

This is of course valid for websites that customers visit again and again, and not for all web addresses.

Chrome 9.0 Beta also features WebGL turned on by default, “WebGL is a 3D graphics API for JavaScript that developers can use to create fully 3D web apps,” explained Kenneth Russell, Software Engineer.

“It is based on the OpenGL ES 2.0 API, which should be familiar to many 3D graphics developers. Google, Mozilla, Apple, Opera and graphics hardware vendors have been working together to standardize WebGL for over a year now, and since the spec is just about final at this point, we wanted to get our implementation out there for feedback.”

Google Chrome for Windows is available for download here.

Google Chrome for Linux is available for download here.

Google Chrome for Mac is available for download here.